“This will be the Section.80 mixtape before my good kid, m.A.A.d city,” he vowed in The Fader. This album is a self-professed effort to lay a foundation for future classics. A student of Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, he aspires to hifalutin aesthetics and big ideas. His songs aren’t deep enough to warrant or hold up under dissection and they aren’t ignorant enough to scan as brainless amusement. He has labeled his music “suburban trap” or trap with substance, trying to collapse a nonexistent lowbrow-highbrow trap binary, as if Jeezy’s The Recession never happened. (He helped people get their GEDs in prison.) He clearly wants his songs to appeal to the rap thinkers, for listeners to have to peel back the layers of meaning and have epiphanies. IDK, whose name stands for Ignorantly Delivering Knowledge, considers himself a polymath and educator. Even at its most lucid, it falls well short of lofty ambitions. It doesn’t always track, and its pursuit of grandiosity feels largely fruitless. It’s what happens in between that makes the album perplexing. His unspooling scriptural thread is easy enough to follow. In the end, these outlooks crescendo into the PG County rapper arguing that humans don’t have the capacity to dispute His being the end result of his probe is basically the shrugging emoticon.

It opens with a kid denying God’s existence, and an uneven discourse unfolds from there, with rap theology serving as plot points along the album’s arc: a DMX prayer, a conversation about divinity with Tyler, the Creator, a hood psalm from GLC, and IDK playing Devil’s advocate. The “He” in the title is God, the framework around which the album is built. His major-label debut, Is He Real?, is a concept album of sorts, in the way all of his projects are there is a theme and a structure but it isn’t actually beholden to them. Maryland rapper IDK wants to be rap’s next great aesthetician.

Idk i was very bad zip